This is another Common Kingfisher that I took in Israel last winter. I had been shooting most of the morning, and by the time I spotted this one, the light was harsh, so I reduced the highlights and whites in PS. It's a very small crop: I was pretty close!
Canon7D
300 mm lens / 1.4 TC
f 5.6, 1/500s, ISO 200, tripod
Gorgeous -- not what I'd call "common." Beautiful colors and light.
I assume you mean it's a very slight crop, since you were close. (Good work on that score!) It looks like it was sharp to begin with but I'm seeing a ragged JPEG-y look throughout, including some noise in the BG. How did you do the resizing, and what sharpening or noise reduction, if any? I have a feeling you could improve it technically.
Beautiful shot! They don't always come so close so you've had a bit of luck on your side. Interesting that it's ringed. I'd be tempted to raise highlights & shadows in the eye just a tad to see if I can get a little more detail from it.
I'm a little surprised about the amount of noise coming from little crop and a low ISO setting. Perhaps heavy sharpening in PP?
Thanks, Diane and Tobie. I'm not sure how the image got so noisy, so I decided to start again from scratch (that is...my RAW file). I think it looks better, but here is my workflow in case you have suggestions for improvement: in RAW, I reduced highlights and whites, and increased clarity slightly. I also applied a slight s-curve. I don't usually reduce noise in RAW...I try to do it with Nik Dfine, but I'm a little pressed for time so I thought I'd give the NR in Camera RAW a try. It looked okay so I saved it as a .psd file, and cropped it (using an adjustment layer). Then I tried to clone out some of the debris in the plant, but I can't always clone when I'm using layers. So I saved it as a new flat file (preserving the layered file for the future because I know you advise never to flatten Diane!), and cloned out the debris. I also applied shadows / highlights to the eye, as Tobie suggested. Then I saved that as a jpeg, resized to 1200x833, and sharpened very slightly with USM. Then I saved for web. So, let me know what you think about both the image and the workflow, and please advise me on cloning when I'm using layers! Thanks again!
Wendy your reworked pic (RP) looks tons better (definately as far as noise is concerned!) although I would have ended it by returning a tad of sharpness on the bird alone. Just the following from personal experience, as I read your workflow:
- I usually raise LR's sharpening bar up to max 2/3rds and then remove increased noise by raising the luminosity bar. Any sharpening thereafter I take to PS;
- I'm not too fond of LR's tonal curves so if I use it, I do it very sparingly. I prefer doing tonal adjustments via luminosity masks in PS;
- I use the spot removal tool in LR for small isolated items. For anything else I use PS' Fill / Content Aware feature. It's an absolutely amazing tool although it does have its limits.
- After bringing some life into a bird's eye by raising highlights & shadows, I usually also increase the sharpness on it just a tad to keep the 'sparkle' in it;
- I do all my exports (sharpening 'for screen') in LR. The export screen includes resizing settings (dimensions as well as Mb) so it's sweet, short & simple;
Use this ETL forum to experiment under guidance of the experienced guys - that's what it's there for!
I'm just on a laptop, on the road for a couple of day, but this is much better! There is a purple fringe on the top of the beak -- did you correct for chromatic aberration? Sometimes that doesn't do it, though. There is also a separate fringing correction. But sometimes it's easier to clone something like that.
Working in layers shouldn't rule out cloning. Do it first, on the BG layer. If artifacts crop up later it may indicate you just need to go back and clone more carefully, or go back to the raw file for some tweaks. And work with Adjustment layers, not duplicated pixel layers with adjustments glued into them. With adjustment layers, you can go back to the BG layer and clone at any time.
Be very careful of too much NR and sharpening in raw processing. It will be glued into the file once it opens in PS. We have great tools now to work on that in PS. I use a little of both, but very judiciously. You can't improve a bad file. You can only make a good one better.
Don't resize and save and sharpen a JPEG and then do Save for Web. Let Save for Web do all the work directly from your master file. Or Export from LR with the proper settings, as Tobie suggests. That's what I do.
Hi, Wendy! What a gorgeous bird! I really like the composition and the rework works well. One thing that caught my eye immediately was the highlight in the birds eye. I'm pretty sure you added it. IMO, you should tone it down a bit (and I'm not sure the positioning right in the middle of the eye is right).
Ian, good catch on the catchlight. I hadn't even noticed it but the position does seem wrong. I'd move it much higher -- my inclination would be to place it just above the top of the pupil. But I'd love to see the more experienced bird photographers weigh in.
I've wondered about this, too so I did a simple experiment. The cornea is acting like to a lens with a very curved front element, so I took my 17mm TS-E, which is almost fisheye in the curvature of the front element, and held it centered on the horizon at my eye level (so if I looked through it I was seeing the horizon in the center). With the sun directly behind me and high in the sky, the "catchlight" in the lens was vertically above the center, somewhat in from the edge. As I rotated my body so the sun was well toward my right shoulder, the catchlight moved on a horizontal line to the right and moved very close to the edge on the lens.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has a different theory.
Any changes made to an image in processing are like a marriage -- if you're gonna cheat, don't get caught!
Hmmm ... that makes sense. I'll need to try that with my Rokinon 8mm FE. That 17 TS-E is a lens that I covet. I got to play with one a few years back and fell in love immediately.
Yes, so many toys! I just got my fisheye cheap on e-bay and have just begun to play with it. As for the TS, I figured I'd be happier with a 17 than a 24 since I shoot crop sensor.
Thanks for your interesting comments. Actually I did NOT add the catchlight! I took the photo at about 11am in the desert, where the sun was high in the sky. The sun was most likely behind me, judging from the shadow on the thistle. So the placement of the catchlight is consistent with Diane's experiment, I think.
Hmmm -- it's not consistent with my reasoning as it's in the lower half of the eye, but if it's reflected off water it could make sense there. Was that the case? Otherwise I may not have things figured out correctly. (That would be nothing new...)
If the sun was high and there was water between you and the bird, that would account for the position of the catchlight, as a reflection. I would expect to see a second catchlight, from the direct sun, high in the eye, but since the bird is looking down a little, maybe it would be above the reflective part of the eye.
I'm new to bird photography but I've seen mention here in the case of birds on the water, of removing a second catchlight -- presumably one reflected from the water. It looks like that's the case here, but we can only see the reflected one. Interesting!
I hope someone more experienced can shed some light (as the saying goes...)
I'm puzzled too at this point. I inadvertently did another experiment today. Have been trying to do the photo-a-day thing and at mid-afternoon decided to shoot the woodpeckers who were at the water drip on our deck. The light was already behind them so I used on-camera flash (Better Beamer). So the flash was the "sun." In one shot the "lens" (cornea) was aimed at me and the catchlight was as I expected from my earlier post.
Then it looked a little more toward me and the catchlight was basically at the same point relative to my viewpoint and the "lens" surface, but was closer to the edge of the lens because it had moved (rotated):
Then I shot an oak titmouse, looking down and, although the catchlight is much smaller (no idea why -- I think everything else was the same) I got it in the low position Wendy had:
Wow, Diane, that was a very interesting experiment and thanks for sharing! Wendy's kingfisher was looking down like your titmouse. She doesn't say that she used flash, so the sun must have been behind her to get the same catchlight position as your flash. I learn so much here.
Common Kingfisher
Beautiful colors and light.
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